Shouldn’t You Be Writing

Hello gentle reader,

January 7th, 2013 (that’s today!) is the official start date for Round 1 of A Round of Words in 80 Days (aka ROW80). I have decided to join this writing challenge for the fourth time. Created by Kait Nolan, ROW80 is “the writing challenge that knows you have a life”, or “the challenge that champions the marriage of writing and real life.” Unlike NaNoWriMo which runs for only a month, each ROW80 round runs for 80 days and the participating writers have to set themselves writing goals for that time. Each Wednesday and Sunday, we check in and let the others know how we are doing. The idea is to form writing habits that writers will hopefully continue once the challenge is over.

As you may know if you follow this blog, my daily life is pretty crazy. I have a day job that keeps me extremely busy, I travel a lot and I read tons of books. Fitting some writing time in my schedule is a challenge, but I’m still very intent on getting published one day.

So here are my goals for this round (and yes, I know they are the same as the last round’s, but if at first you don’t succeed…) :

Write or edit every day

Writing – Write a short story, and continue writing the first draft of The Cursed King

Editing – I’m currently querying The Last Queen, and I keep this goal in case someone (!) asks for a revision…

This First Round starts today and will end on Thursday, March 28^th. Every Sunday I post about an author’s successful journey into publishing. Make sure to stop by if you need motivation to keep writing!

If you would like to join in this writing challenge and become a part of the ROW80 community, here are the rules:

Post a goals post in which you lay out your goals for this round.
Post a check-in post every Wednesday and/or Sunday, in which you share your progress with the other ROW80 participants.
Comment on other participants’ check-in posts.

Here is the Linky for the other participants’ posts. What are your ROW80 goals for this round?

Hello gentle reader,

For the past two weeks I have been neglecting my fellow ROWers and instead focusing on the JuNoWriMo writing challenge. For those who don’t know what JuNoWriMo is, check out this post. Oh, and if you’re reading this because you’re looking for my awesome “Clear Your Shelf” Giveaway, you’ll need to look a little bit further: here.

With JuNoWriMo, my goal is to write every day, even if I don’t make the 50,000-word goal. I hesitated a while before deciding to join in, for two reasons. First, I spend an average of 62 hours a week at work, which means that I only write between 30 minutes and an hour a day. Second, I am a slow writer: I cannot spill 1000 words onto a page in half an hour. So the prospect of having to write an average of 1667 words a day was quite frightening. But I still decided to do the challenge, as it is a great way to keep motivated and to interact with fellow writers.

So how have I been doing, you ask? I have been writing every single day, which I am very happy about. My word count, however, has been lower than the required average of 1667 words a day. As of today my average is 1160 words a day. But I am interacting with fellow writers and keeping motivated (sprints on Twitter are especially good for me!).

What JuNoWriMo has helped me do so far is fighting procrastination. You see, gentle reader, I am terrible when it comes to putting things off. At the beginning of the challenge, I was like this: